“spring
& all”
spring
snow falls hard
winter’s long goodbye & the hours
confused
by the Time Change
one clock says 11 the other 12 but the
other
being
digital is correct
it
doesn’t feel that late a mixture of
times & weathers
of
reports and seasons of a wreath still
attached to a doorway
or
the red curly knobs on an orb of virus
decorative
blue
stone and pink shale, spikes of yucca reliably green
winter
& summer she thought she knew
the place
but
didn’t and waited for the return of
her husband
from
afar while one clock ticked and the
other just changed
automatically we know which one is right
William
Carlos Williams’ stiff twigs on the way to the hospital
are
a sort of particular spring-brown
universal speaking to
the
many who wonder, what next?
besides growth
it’s
probably not even close, the hospital
the woman
who
heard the ambulance go by was a fiction
but it scared her
since
she hadn’t seen her husband for quite a while
doing
the mending, looking up, looking out, looking over
bringing
the needle closer the “arms” of the
clock joining up
at
noon and at midnight like a pair
of scissors closing
LOOKING
SOMETHING UP IN THE DICTIONARY
It
gives me such great pleasure
to
spin my office chair around to face the bookshelf
and
pull out Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
with
the softening navy-blue leather covers
heavy
in the hand, but happy to fall open at any page—
to
look up the word laconic which I thought
described
some recent poems, but then I wondered
what
laconic actually means.
It
turns out it means what I thought it did,
“terseness,
sparing of words.” What a strange thing
it
is to open a dictionary inherited via one’s ex-husband
in
the long-ago divorce—
&
to wonder how he might feel now so far away
to
see his grandmother’s handwriting on the flyleaf
in
blue fountain-pen ink
some
words she’d wanted to look up:
nostalgia,
arthritis, recluse.
LATE
AGAIN
Early
January and I was too hot in my big coat
&
black alpaca scarf that used to belong
to
my husband’s stepdad George
who
had always been a sharp dresser
a
sales representative for Gilbey’s Gin
doing
the rounds of the bars and restaurants
of
post-war Vancouver and environs,
coming
home late all the time
for
dinner, everyone angry, eating
what
had gone cold in the waiting period
that
seemed, now, an inevitability
as
George deteriorated and drank
having
served in World War Two
on
a military ship torpedoed in the Pacific
nevertheless,
he was good at the barbecue grill
and
kept at hand a recipe book of cocktails
and
was well-spoken with a bit of a posh accent
when
he was around
which
was seldom. His scarf still folds neatly
owing
to the excellent quality of its fabric.
He’d
unwind it as he unbuttoned his coat
and
took of his hat & met the furious demeanour
of
his wife with some sort of mean posh
comeback,
& everyone was miserable.
Sharon Thesen
is a Cascadian poet, writer, editor and Professor Emerita of Creative Writing
at UBCs Okanagan campus.